My father died of liver cancer three years ago this month.\u00a0 May 31st, actually.\u00a0 It’s the kind of anniversary one remembers quietly, and I wouldn’t mention it here except that Lois, my stepmother, called this morning with news of Dad’s remaining siblings.\u00a0 Uncle Lindley, one of Dad’s older brothers, has lung cancer.\u00a0 Uncle Fay, the oldest brother, has lung and spinal cancer (and his wife Frances has mascular degeneration).\u00a0 Aunt Audentia, the next youngest after my father, and now the youngest sibling (Uncle Fran, the youngest of all, died several years ago, also of cancer), has pneumonia and a staph infection.<\/p>\n
Donna had asked me to write an award submission for a friend, and it was my goal to finish that today.\u00a0 Instead, I sat unproductively at the computer, surfing blogs and news sites.\u00a0 It was all I could do to write short get-well notes to my uncles and aunt, but at least those are done now and ready for tomorrow’s mail.<\/p>\n
I’m normally not one to suffer from writer’s block, but I realize now that’s what I’m experiencing.\u00a0 I didn’t think mortality bothered me all that much, but of course it does.\u00a0 After my father died, I thought about death almost every day for a year.\u00a0 And now — though of course I hope for miraculous cures and remissions for my uncles and aunt — I’m thinking about it again.<\/p>\n
Sorry, I didn’t mean for this to be such a bummer of a post.<\/p>\n
I’m going to hug my dog a lot tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My father died of liver cancer three years ago this month.\u00a0 May 31st, actually.\u00a0 It’s the kind of anniversary one remembers quietly, and I wouldn’t mention it here except that Lois, my stepmother, called this morning with news of Dad’s remaining siblings.\u00a0 Uncle Lindley, one of Dad’s older brothers, has lung cancer.\u00a0 Uncle Fay, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3908"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3926,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908\/revisions\/3926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}